In 2006, 29-year-old Kevin Rose was really big stuff. The founder of Digg was running one of the biggest social media companies in the world, until Facebook came along. While Digg still puffs along with a small staff, and is still in the Internet's Top 200 sites, Rose, who has invested in Facebook, Gowalla, and a number of other social web companies, stepped down as interim CEO in 2010. He left in March 2011 to found Milk, and app-development shop that was quasi-acquired by Google on March 16, where they will ostensibly join the Google Plus team. (Digg actually discussed a $200M sale to Google in 2008, but Google backed out.)

When I saw this news, I immediately thought, "Wow, this is the beginning of the end for Google+."

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The end

You may think I'm a little nuts talking about the beginning of the end of Google Plus, especially when I've completed a Lynda.com course on Google+, and numerous big-kahuna social media types like my friend Chris Brogan - who's a pretty smart guy - have written entire books about it.

After Amir Efrati's February article in the Wall Street Journal revealed that, after sign up, Google+ users aren't really doing anything much with the platform, a pretty stunning info-graphic really jumped out at readers - it was a diagram that showed the average minutes-per-user for all social networks in January 2012. Table A shows the breakdown, based on ComScore's data, which does not include mobile usage.

And so the New York Times jumped into the fray, digging deeper into Gundrota's metrics. Google shared a stat stating that 50 million of the people who created a Google+ account actively use their Google+ enhanced products daily, and that over 100 million people have signed up for the product.

The problem with Google's stats is that they don't indicate that "enhanced products" includes Google.com and YouTube, the #1 and #3 sites on the Internet. (#2, unsurprisingly, is Facebook).

"Realistically, the debate over how many people use Google Plus, how many real users it has seems almost irrelevant. Google is determined to make Google Plus work at all costs, even in the face of naysayers," said Nick Bilton, who wrote the NY Times blog post on Google+.

Bottom line

Google's take on their speed of growth is becoming essentially irrelevant at this point, regardless of what Gundrota says or what Google's executive team believes. Google's recent quasi-acquisition of Kevin Rose's Milk team seems like a last-ditch effort to bring some proven social web talent to the Google+ team, which is admirable, but ultimately doomed.

Google is a fish out of water - they're a great search and advertising company that is simply not good at making social media products used by consumers (or even B2B collaboration). Now's the time to shutter Google+, and consign it to the dust-heap where many of their other social products lie (Jaiku, Google Buzz, and Google Wave to name a few), and allocate all that Google+ talent to doing what the company does best - selling a ton of advertising in a way that really resonates with its customers.

About Adam Metz

Adam Metz is the VP of Business Development at Metz Consulting the social concept, a social customer management-consulting firm, based in Oakland, California. Metz has consulted with companies since 2006 on how to acquire, manage, monetize and retain...

Full Bio

Adam Metz is the VP of Business Development at Metz Consulting the social concept, a social customer management-consulting firm, based in Oakland, California. Metz has consulted with companies since 2006 on how to acquire, manage, monetize and retain customers from the social web. Metz's customer community, at http://metz.customerhub.net has nearly 500 members, and offers a no-cost 9-hour training course on social customer relationship management.Metz's second book, The Social Customer, was released on 9/16/11 and has hit #1 on the Amazon marketing charts. Adam's first book, There Is No Secret Sauce, has sold or downloaded over 3000 copies, and is currently in its third printing. He has additionally published an eBook, The Metz Way.Metz specializes in social media marketing and social customer relationship management (social CRM) for awesome consumer brands and loves lifestyle, travel, apparel and consumer-packaged goods (CPG) companies.Metz has consulted with nearly 100 consumer and B2B companies, including Hershey's Chocolate, Waggin' Train Pet Food, Wente Vineyards (top 30 winery) Pirate's Booty, MBT Shoes, Maestroconference, Obama Girl (Barely Political), Lynda.com, Passport Resorts, Hollywood Park Racetrack, The San Francisco Convention and Visitor's Bureau, Mighty Leaf Tea, Timbuk2 bags, and dozens of others. Adam Metz also worked on the first social media program for Pulitzer-Prize winning author Thomas Friedman.Metz has lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Washington, and University of California, Santa Cruz and has given keynote talks at numerous conferences and associations including the California and Minnesota Chapters of the American Marketing Association, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the Western Association of Convention & Visitors Bureau Technology Conference, and the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association.Metz lives in Oakland, California with his fiancee Susan.

I must admit I couldn't care less about either Facebook or Google+, but the statistics used in this article seems questionable to me. Facebook has been around for 8 years and has been highly popular for what, 4 or 5? (I'm open to being corrected here... like I said I don't follow these things). By contrast Google+ is a new product that I believe has only recently come out of being invite-only and is now available to everyone. So is it any surprise that the average total minutes spent per user is significantly higher for Facebook? If an avid Facebook user spends an hour a day on the system and has been using it since it became popular 5 years ago then they will have spent the best part of 2000 hours on it. An avid Google+ user also spending an hour a day will have spent maybe 200.

What is failure in The Age of the Platform? Plus was never meant to "beat" Facebook or Twitter. Google needed a viable social plank in its platform. Plus is clearly better than Google's previous social efforts. Look at Apple and Amazon. Each's platform has become more social over the last five years.
Phil Simon
www.theageoftheplatform.com

Google thought that if they got all the journalists hooked, then everyone else would come to the party.
But the bulk of Facebook users are 35 - 60 year old women (stats. from somewhere - I forget where - try google) and they don't read media journalists - they only read Facebook (just to keep in touch with their kids).
The bulk of the 'Social Media' market doesn't even know Google+ exists.
You need to try advertising on Facebook, Google.

Interesting thing with Facebook, it's a time waster. G+ saves me time and since I use Chrome/Gmail etc. I get my G+ updates without actually being on the site. I think their minutes per use reflects this.

If we take 'Google' (i.e. Gmail + Picasa + YouTube + Google+ + ...) to be equivalent to 'Facebook' (i.e. Facebook Messages + Facebook Photos + Facebook Videos + the social piece ...), wouldn't that be more legitimate? In that case, I'll bet that 'Google' isn't at 3 minutes per month - it's more likely closer to the Facebook total.
Alternatively, you could compare just the so-called social piece of 'Google' (i.e. 'Google+') to just the social piece of 'Facebook' (whatever you consider that to be) and I'll bet that those two numbers are pretty close as well. Or compare time in Gmail to time in Facebook Messages. Etc.

I think there is this perception that Google+ and Facebook are competitors, which may not be strictly accurate.
In the beginning, everyone predicted Facebook social groups running from Facebook's increasingly, "Share everything with everyone" environment to Google's, "Share What you Want With Who you Want" philosophy.
But that didn't really happen. Facebook responded by backing off just enough that it retained users who already have vibrant, well-established, very *social* networks established there.
But this is where my use model for Google+ emerged - and why it ended up being a DIFFERENT environment than Facebook.
Facebook is mostly about reconnecting - it is my daily high-school reunion. It is my living room, where I socialize with closer friends who know me. There are two things that come from this:
One: When I share my tech opinions and writing on Facebook, I get a lot of, "Your ARX Transponder FT2010 running Greek Yogurt with Blueberries on a unchained chinstrapped multicored PGU blah blah blah... stop talking GEEK, Donovan! Post pictures of your family on vacation and what you had for dinner last night! Tell us how much you hate Ohio and miss California."
Two: When I get people who are readers or fellow techies that want to "friend" me on Facebook, I'm a little uncomfortable with giving them a view into what kind of cars I drive, how much I drink at the office party, what kind of activities my wife and child and I pursue in our lives, both professional and leisure. Things I am perfectly comfortable sharing with friends I've know since 2nd grade, I'm less hip about sharing with people I've known solely online for less than a few years. I'm not sure I want them seeing me in my beach-shorts lounging in the pool at the Wynn with a skyscraper margarita and a bad sunburn.
And that is a big difference. I don't do a lot of EXPANSION of my social network on Facebook. There is some of that - but mostly it is reconnecting and keeping in touch. It is my primary social network, no doubt about it - because it is where I am really *myself*. So you might find out some things about me that are TMI, if you follow me on Facebook. You may get sick of me fawning over how awesome my kid is, how nice my house is, how frustrated my job makes me, how awesome the Buffalo-Meat Patty Melt at the Blind Pig in Louisville, Ky tasted.
My friends are actually interested in these things (and I'm interested in what they're doing that would bore you, too). I've never understood people who complain about other people posting endlessly about their families, lives and interests on Facebook. That is what Facebook is all *about*. If you're following people and their constant posts of their kids *annoy* you, you're doing Facebook wrong. You shouldn't be friends with people if you don't care about the great dinner they had in that really nice new Sushi place in Baltimore for their 20th anniversary last night.
On Google+, though - I've got a much smaller circle, mostly of writers, techies, and other industry professionals, academics and "thinkers". There are far fewer of my social *friends* there. I've MET more people on Google+ in a much shorter time. The entire dynamic is radically *different*. Google+ is like Twitter, only with far more interaction, discussion and dialog. There are a lot of brilliant people there I disagree with vocally, and they with me, and a lot of those people seem to enjoy the thrill of the verbal conflict as much as I do. Like Twitter, I have more followers on Google+ than I follow.
I recently wondered if Google+ threatens publishers like TR, because frequently I'll post a story here, link to promote it on Google+, and I'll get a much more focused group of posters responding in the thread on my Google+ stream than here in the forums. The quality of the comments on Google+ is also frequently a little more focused. I think a little more thought goes into making a post on Google+. The poster has more of an incentive to only weigh in if they've really got an opinion. You get less, off-the-cuff responses in a Google+ thread. This may also be simply because most of the readers and followers are also writers, bloggers, journalists and others with some sort of relationship with the industry. There is also a more balanced response, frequently, to issues that might inspire fan-boyism. It seems like Google+ attracts critical thinkers who are more open-minded to different possibilities in discussion threads. It isn't absolutely free of this, but in general, people seem more willing to look at alternate perspectives on technology than "Android rulez, Apple is the Sux0rz!"
And I don't do a lot of posting about how nice the weather is or isn't on Google+. If I share an image on Google+, it is probably a side by side comparison of the Galaxy 7.7, the Kindle DX and the iPad 1 that Tech Republic didn't have space for on my article. You're not going to see pictures of me on my 45th birthday dancing with the Roller Derby team we met at the bar (unless we all had Droid 4s and I thought that said something about Android users being tough, no-nonsense, roughnecks who are ready to throw down at a moment's notice).
Google+ is still emerging. It seems to have a lot more justification to exist than what I've seen of "Instagram", so far (Twitter, with pictures, for aspiring artists, if you're wondering). I go through waves, on Google+, Facebook is a constant. But they're serving radically different purposes in my life, despite their surface similarities.
I think the more important question is can a social community of journalists, bloggers, writers, and academics without really close ties but a lot of common interests grow and flourish, or will it end up eating itself when no one can get along with anyone else for very long?

The real names issue and cancelling of accounts at the very beginning put a VERY bad taste in most users mouths. And without any API integration, I can totally see why the "doomed" view is at hand. Those that can't play nice with others often endure a lonely existance and then death...

Facebook has games and my kids like it. All my family and friends are on Facebook, and only a few (mostly technically oriented) work friends are on google+. Google+ needs to offer something more compelling than what Facebook does, which is not currently the case i think.
I agree with the microblogging comment of AnsuGisalas, it's more than what twitter offers but not quite a real blog. Several people in my regular stream 'micro-blog' and it's quite entertaining, but I don't think that it will replace the value of Facebook.

Like the stats have shown, I can say that I'm one of those users who signed up and never really did anything with it. I wonder when we will reach a point where the next social media app/website is just too much and the market is too saturated with the various options. I'm already thinking we are there, people just like to try new stuff and claim they were the "first ones" in using the latest trending app/website. I'm ready to say enough!

Will G+ become a way for people to add their opinions about objects in the net? Could be.
G+ does not look like it's trying to be a deeply immersive experience like Facebook.
G+ does seem very good for microblogging, the kind of thing that's too preachy for most web forums, but isn't long enough or regular enough to warrant a more complete blog.
G+ could become ubiquitous, SPECIFICALLY because it's shallow. People can't as well justify shooting up some FB during work, as they can justify spending that three minutes it takes to do something meaningful on G+.
That's the flip side of the different usage pattern; G+ is fast to use. It doesn't try to represent your whole life. It's not your lifeline to your own identity. It's just a way to communicate yourself, in quick bursts.
I will never start shooting up FB. But G+ isn't as intrusive, so I have no problems with it.

The user experience isn't just 'better'. Its awesome. With Google+ Hangouts offering extra functionality in the whole collaboration initiative, and perhaps integrating even more (and better) with Google Apps in the near future, I think it will stay established. I don't believe it will catch up to Facebook anytime soon, though.
I think Google+ will be to Facebook what Apple Macs are to PC's, in terms of numbers and differentiating strategy.

What else would Mr. Gundrota of Google say about Google+ other than it's doing very well. [How many times a network would say that some new show is a hit only to cancel it 2 weeks later?].
Seriously, Facebook numbers continue to climb. Google+ can't even hit [ok, maybe by now] 100 million. In the time Google+ started up [with their fake "beta" phase included], Facebook went up twice the amount.
On top of that Google counts the number of accounts - active or not. Facebook counts active accounts. The difference? When you create a Gmail account [or YouTube], a Google+ account is automatically created at the same time. You have to cancel out to get rid of Google+.

Well not everyone, but enough people use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chrome, even the search engine. Eventually everyone will use Google+ because it's more convenient to use a social network from the same company.

... I personally am not going to be a member of Jay's brave new cross-synced world until everyone being cross-synced, linked and shared is on the same page security and information-sharing wise.
But he's right nonetheless. Why would the social media market be any different - market share matters...

Don't really know, don't really care.
Most of the social-media sites are truly more trouble than they're worth. About the only one I use anymore is LinkedIn, and even that barely. I actually despise dealing with Facebook, and hate when something basic requires a facebook link or login of some type.

I think Google, aren't trying to /directly/ compete with facebook in-so-much as side swipe them. All they need is people to sign up and to seamlessly integrate the social aspect with all their other tools (and yes, release and API for third party products to do the same) and make it work so natural you barely realise you're doing it.
I think this is where they were going with the Google+ results in the searches, they want to target you on a personal level and as seamless as possible. That means when you are creating a document for work or an assignment for school you are talking and collaborating the researching with your friends right from the app, using previous searches and preferences for sites from you and your friends who are currently doing the same thing and content-aware searching (just look at their dictionary) for what you are working on. It can amalgamate these things into the UI of Google+ or Docs or GMail or Android...
For games, it would mean shared high scores tables along platforms, maybe instead of annoying 'help me' posts it will develop into a joint venture type thing where playing the same games as people in your circles, and talking about said games reward you (using context-aware searching of your posts). Also, games your friends (and their friends) play are more visible to you on Play than just what 'everyone' is playing.
With entertaining links, you could have a dedicated media stream where things your friends have watched, listened to, looked at, read come up.
All these things will be customisable and available from your personal Google portal where you can launch all their services and searcht too.

I agree with Jay 100%. Social sites, especially new ones, should be embracing interoperability. I envision a world where some day users can choose to work in their one or two favorite sites, but share interaction with other sites, rather than having to resort to an additional third-party app like HootSuite. Then it becomes all about the user experience as far as who gets the page views. And I DO prefer the G+ user experience.
But until it can play nice with my other social channels, it's simply not worth the additional time investment.

Google+ remains the only major social network without API posting access. I can get a common client for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (and even Myspace if I for some reason wanted it) that lets me produce and consume from multiple networks simultaneously. I will not choose to abandon my Twitter and Facebook friends strictly to use Google+, especially when many of them haven't switched or even tried G+. I can't do centralized linksharing or use any of the newer cross-syncing and parsing tools like dlvr.it and ifttt.com with G+ because Google wants a walled garden where only hand-posted links are available, and no data is ever extracted from my G+ feed.
Unless and until G+ plays well with other systems, they force me to choose between established networks and their own product -- and the old nets are where my friends are. Google is trying to compete on features and avoid competing on incumbency, but the greatest value a social network offers is the people on it, and until I can bridge the gao between G+ Facebook and Twitter, G+ will lose -- and keep losing.

[b]"You may think I???m a little nuts talking about the beginning of the end of Google Plus, especially when I???ve completed a Lynda.com course on Google+"[/b]
This is just a ridiculous sentence. So because you took a course on Lynda.com you are somehow a devoted/genius-level Google+ user? Oh brother.
Also, Digg failed because Kevin Rose and co. made fundamental changes to their service that spit in the face of its userbase. Kevin Rose is a terrible "social media" person - he got lucky with Digg and now Reddit has stolen all of its thunder. Google did not acquire anything of value when they purchased the lackluster Milk.
All that said, Google+ is failing and will probably be declared dead in 2014. But that's because Google can't ever follow through with anything. They have plenty of ideas, but only a handful are decent and the ones that are given the greenlight aren't those. That's why we've gotten rubbish like Wave, Go, Google+, etc.

I've never set foot into Facebook. I signed up for MySpace back when it started getting popular, because everyone said I had to be a part of this amazing new thing that would change my life. Well, it didn't. I tend to be way more immediate. If I haven't seen you in 6 months, I'll probably forget to text you on your birthday. No offense, I've just got a lot going on, and I get distracted easily when I don't maintain my focus.
When I saw which acquaintances were on Google+, I signed up for it. You're absolutely right -- at least for now, it's mostly savvy users with interesting points of view. I like that I can divide my contacts into arbitrary groups and broadcast things of interest only to people I think might get some use out of it.
I expect that, eventually, it will be littered with the same trite minutiae that you see on Twitter and Facebook, but the ability to organize your circles goes a long way toward providing an architecture that helps to tune out the noise.
Also, to the author: Please don't start digging any graves yet. How long was Facebook around before people "got it"? The site's fundamental purpose even morphed over time. G+ is here now, and people will make of it what they will. If Google respects this and designs it to meet our changing needs and wants, it'll do fine. But people aren't *quite* fickle enough to pick up and move social networks every time a new one pops up.

There are people who are shy to play openly. These get attracted BT google and LinkedIn. But, thing is ... The others, those who are not afraid to play are way, way more.
This is why google+ will remain boutique.

First, thanks for the blueberry yogurt nonsense; it was the high point of my week.
Second, you've partially answered a question I posed somewhere above: what needs or wants does G+ meet than the others don't. It sound like you use it as a business tool, like LinkedIn but with much less emphasis on 'networking'. In fact, how you use it almost makes me want to take a shot at it, and made me far more interested in it than I ever will be with FB.
However, I'm still too paranoid about where I create accounts.

Let me say what I said earlier...
You have to be joking...apparently you have never visited G+. There are hundreds of games on google+: along with an extension for the Chrome browser, google+ was the first desktop iteration of Angry Birds. Maybe you should go look at the number of games available for G+ and compare that to what is offered on Facebook...you might be surprised.

It's great for us techies to have a place to enjoy the closed unified environment G+ is offering us, without Farmville type apps and all the useless chatter that goes on at FB! Like Apple products (I'm not a fan btw) having a more controlled "suite" can be a huge "plus"!
Coming from the Human Capital technology space, the "panacea" is promoted at a "unified suite of talent management solutions" where all the different modules come from one vendor and work together, *however* they still promote open APIs to ensure data and process flow with other vendors needed to help companies truly manage their human capital supply chain.... Google should sit up and notice! Heck even LinkedIn allows you to connect to Twitter :)

"I'm looking for my wallet. I lost it over there, but the light is better over here."
It doesn't matter how good the experience is if your friends are somewhere else.
Does Google Plus have a target market? FB has identified itself as the place to hang out with friends and family. LinkedIn is for business relationships. Twitter is to run your mouth. What needs or wants does Google Plus fulfill?

Many people already object to the amount of data Google collects. You and I know FB isn't any better, but if someone is already on FB they may not see a reason to give a second company access to the same personal info.

As a marketer, I understand your desire to reach masses of people. As an end-user, I don't need every media stream blaring the same information at me. That's why there's more than one.
dcolbert's response below has this pretty well defined. Twitter is a great marketing tool. Facebook is a playground at recess. Google+ is collaborative.
When people stop playing to their strengths and using them all as a conduit for advertisement, their unique qualities are no longer relevant. We may as well just give up on new social media and all subscribe to the same Usenet feed.
If I were an engineer at Google, I would think twice before opening up an API and becoming "yet another media outlet you can dump links to". It may be slightly less convenient to have to open up separate web pages or client apps, but smashing them all together is like putting your meat and potatoes in a blender, along with a bottle of Merlot.

I mean, yes, it's bad if they desire you to replace your other services with G+, but where it comes to privacy, there seems to be benefits to not bleeding data in the ways required by API access, or what do you think?

When I first arrived here... Jason Hiner was spending a lot of time trying to figure out what we were all going to do with Twitter. Ashton Kutcher had just made Twitter a real high profile social media site - and there was a lot of dialog in the forums, much of it amounting to, "What good is a Facebook that only allows 140 character posts". I remember Jason describing his "Aha moment" in a blog, and reading it and thinking, "I've been trying to find an aha moment on Twitter for a couple of months now, and it hasn't happened yet."
It didn't until I started writing blogs for TR and wanted to promote them. The aha moment hit me when some other blogger linked to a blog I wrote and @tagged me in their tweet, and that tweet reached thousands of people, some that retweeted again to their followers - and the pyramid scheme became clear to me.
Twitter has self-promoting content tweet producers and content sharing and content consuming followers. Twitter is mostly a 1 way street. I follow 129 users on Twitter. I interact with maybe 8 of them on a somewhat regular basis. I have 156 followers. I interact with maybe 8 of them on a somewhat regular basis. With the remaining 121 users I follow, I just consume the content they create, share or re-share. The 148 users who follow me, they just consume, and retweet the information I create, share or re-share. There isn't a lot of interactivity going on.
Google is more like Twitter in this regard - but the interaction is more frequent, and more in depth.
Do you value Sonia Thompson's content and are you interested in what she is reading, thinking, and posting, but you don't really care to give her a lot of feedback? Follow her on Twitter.
Do you value these things and want to get in discussions with her and with other people who are interested in what she is saying and doing? Follow her on Google+.
Do you want to know that she recently took her family to Chuck E Cheese and scored 10,000 tickets on Skee-ball and that her Honda Accord has a rip in the leather from when she took her beagle to the dog park? Facebook. (I totally made this last one up).
On Twitter, you build up your network by following people, and then you see people they follow and their tweets. You get interested in those people, and you follow them. In general, you decide who to follow and there is no wait for them to accept your request. But the relationship between content producer and follower is generally pretty one way. There isn't a lot of reciprocal following.
The same model applies to Google+ - except it is more of a two way network. You're more liable to interact with the people you follow, and more likely to have them interact back with you.
You should check it out. You're only ever going to expose whatever you post. You can easily control that aspect of it.

You have to be joking...apparently you have never visited G+. There are hundreds of games on google+: along with an extension for the Chrome browser, google+ was the first desktop iteration of Angry Birds. Maybe you should go look at the number of games available for G+ and compare that to what is offered on Facebook...you might be surprised.

I would hate G+ if it tried to be another Facebook.
It does matter how good the experience is if my friends are elsewhere: I don't want them cluttering my G+ experience with all the friends and family-ish nonsense.
I would want them there if they would contribute to ideas, projects and other interests; not to show me their vacation in the Maldives.
I can't have that in FB, where I get industry news that's meatier and insightful than Twitter, the space is too cluttered with family stuff.

I see a lot of ideas being developed on g+, a lot of interaction.
People also share their artwork, as well as whatever happened to tickle their imagination.
It's less focused than myspace or things like that, more of a stream of consciousness thing, with no predefined topic to be adhered to.

How Google+ can deepen and enrich the relationship between content creators and readers outside of the editorial bounds in which they interact on the sites where they meet.
Ansu and I have had very interesting, conversation about topics we feel strongly about that would not be appropriate or comfortable for discussion here on TR - potentially even in the off-topic forums. On Google+, we have freedom to really interact with one another about a much broader range of topics. There is good and bad in this, but ultimately, it means that I'm not just a one-dimensional tech writer to Ansu who only writes about gadgets and techs. It might give him insight to why I have some opinions about technology, or the same to me. Google+ seems to be a justified model for social network extension, and I hope it continues to grow. I've seen many benefits from it. It could fail, but it would be a shame if it were to.

I still haven't had Jason's 'A ha!' moment, and I don't have anything to promote.
My first problem with Twitter is that it assumes you that if you value someone's opinion on Subject A, you're interested in his opinion on Subjects B though Z. My second problem is it assumes that if you value a person's opinion, you also value the opinion of those he retweets. I can value Sonja's opinion on Honda Accords but consider her ignorant on the subject on where to get decent pizza, and not care what someone she follows thinks about arcade games, especially when six other people have retweeted the same Skee-Ball photo. Regardless, I can find what she posts on her blog with RSS without needing Twitter to tell me she's updated. (Sonja, we apologize for making examples at your expense!)
My most recent attempt at it a couple of weeks ago had the same disappointing results. Instead of technology, this time I tried following a dozen or so people at a time from NASCAR. Drivers, network booth commentators, a couple of other fans I know from another site. There was still too much content I didn't care about compared to what I found interesting, too much chaff to grain. I don't care what they're reading or listening to, what travel problems they're having, just don't get interested in them as people based on bullet comments. Just me, I guess. (I also don't speak Twitterese, but that's another issue. I could pick up the lingo if I thought it was worth the effort.)
Thanks for the excellent breakdown on how you see each of these services. It does sound like G+ might be worth a look. Unlike many here, I don't have to worry about losing contact with FB contacts, since I don't have any. However, part of my problem with web interaction is I have difficulty finding people I consider worth following. Specifically, I know they're out there, but I can't figure out where to start or how to narrow the field.. I've had the same problems since the rise of blogs - "paralysis through analysis".

I am hoping Google enhances circles a bit more. For example, I have a 'Gamers' circle who I share posts about games etc. Now, I don't need their public posts clogging up my stream (unless they are a member of another circle as well). I want to be able to say 'I want to see comments, not shares, I want to see +1's, I don't want to see posts made'
The problem is, if people used it like it was intended you wouldn't have to do that, but when has the majority ever got anything right?
With this is place, bring on the family! If they don't want to control the flow of information, they don't have to and all I have to listen to them on is what they specifically post to me, or comment on.

You forgot that Google tried twice before with a social network and failed. Ever heard of Google Buzz? Google has poured in millions to make Google+ better than the previous incarnations. Difference is that Facebook is entrenched. It has associates with probably every major company out there [well, excluding Google].